Can Digital Terrain Modelling be done in Blender?

Support Modeling
1

Hello

I’m a newbie, been through a few tutorials and discovered that Blender is a really powerful 3D modeling app.

Before I get completely lost can anybody quickly indicate if I am learning the right tool.

What I want to do is import a simple csv file with x,y,z co-ordinates (about 2,500 points planned, 200 so far). Then I want to create a surface model by joining up the points and rendering the frames created. Then I want to export the surface model in a dxf file for further processing in SketchUp. Smoothing would be a nice extra but not essential.

Is Blender the right tool for such an application?

I have checked the dxf export format, that’s fine. The import format is a little trickier as there doesn’t appear to be a csv format import. I could top and tail the csv file to make it into an AC3D format, so not a show stopper.

Will Blender join up the 3D dots ok? I can’t find a tutorial that addresses this scenario but maybe you know of one that I could follow.

Regards
Bob

2

Look at this thread:
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=103587

3

Hi Bob,

Welcome to the forums!

I don’t know of any ability to import a csv file directly. However, I am sue that it could be done with python. I just did a quick search on csv in the “Python and Plugins” forum, and found 7 hits. I believe that would be the best forum for posting this.

Best of Luck!

4

If you have an actual python installation around for blender to interface with, csv should be a snap, there’s a whole library dedicated to it:

http://docs.python.org/lib/module-csv.html

Getting the points to come together would be the hard part :slight_smile:

5

Hans already made a script that imports csv file to mesh (see link above) he also provided a mini tut of how to create csv so it easily can be converted to solid mesh.